Much more "alive" than Saving Private Ryan

Even though I have a hard time finishing the movie sometimes, I find that this movie is so much more honest and true. Saving Private Ryan, like every Spielberg movie, is a mashup of cultural memes and scenes meant to manipulate the viewer in definite ways, and elicit certain reactions. For this reason it ultimately feels cheap and fake. Not to mention the inherent imperial patriotism.

This movie is just so much more centered in the actual day-to-day experience of life that each of us lives in, and that every soldier who died in the war lived in. Soldiers in the war didn't have hindsight to frame their picture of what was happening. They were current and alive for their time, no less than we are for ours. The madness and confusion that so many must have felt on the battlefield is the center of this movie, and if one is receptive enough to these subtleties, I think one can appreciate what this movie was trying to do. When bullets are whizzing by, war is not some idea one knows only through ideas that were created by Hollywood.

One scene that kept coming into mind is the scene where two soldiers die, and then the lighting from the sun changes slightly and a breeze blows through the tall grass. There is more wisdom in this one scene than all of Saving Private Ryan combined.

Anyway, those are just my somewhat half baked thoughts.